THOSE of you decrepit enough to prefer the so-called ''classic rock'' radio format to its ''alternative'' progeny may have noticed, in the months since Sept. 11, an unsettling anthem rising up through your standard diet of Led Zeppelin and the Doors. A sort of Memphis soul number, complete with billowing organ courtesy of Booker T. Jones. Kind of a jaunty tune, in fact, were it not for the lyrics, which concern United Flight 93, which went down in the Pennsylvania countryside just after the World Trade Center calamity. The title is ''Let's Roll.'' The artist is Neil Young.

''Let's roll for freedom, / Let's roll for love, / Goin' after Satan / On the wings of a dove'': Ohmygod. Is this really the same songwriter who immortalized the murdered students at Kent State in ''Ohio''? The songwriter who proved, however briefly, that rock 'n' roll could never die? What could account for such a quaint bit of sermonizing?

Back when, it was his voice that we first loved. A high tenor, almost a countertenor, kind of wobbly around the edges, as though he were working hard to stay on the melody, but in a way that made him seem as if he might be on the verge of weeping, as when he was a miner for a heart of gold, or when he was singing about friends lost to the needle. It was his voice first, reminding you not to let it bring you down, though he was obviously pretty down himself. It was his voice first, a whisper sometimes, as if he were a white Al Green, doing more with the dynamics between whisper and murmur than all the heavy metal whippersnappers could ever do with their shrieks.

And if it was the voice first, it was the guitar later, because few rudimentary guitar players have been so close to the source. On the acoustic and 12-string, he was a folk hero, as in the country-inflected tunes of the mid-70's; this alone would earn him a spot in history, but it was the electric guitar that got him somewhere no one else was going, as in the famous one-note guitar solo on ''Down by the River,'' or in the keening, tremolo-bar wails of ''Cortez the Killer'' and ''Danger Bird,'' solos that were never fast, always full of silences, always about melody, not chops. And if these things were not enough, the countertenor and the electric guitar, there were the songs. Lots of them had no more than three chords and a tune an entire generation of stoned garage bands might have managed, but the words! When the words were doing their job, strange mixtures of imagery and diction fitted together that shouldn't have at all, except in dreams: ''All the bush-league batters are left to die on the diamond, / In the stands the home crowd scatters / For the turnstiles''; ''Sedan delivery is a job I know I'll keep / It sure was hard to find''; ''Meet me at the wrecking ball / Wear something pretty and white.'' Whose lyrics were more perfect? Whose more unpredictable?

Yet as the music journalist Jimmy McDonough makes clear in ''Shakey,'' his exhaustive, quarrelsome and sometimes maddening biography, it's never wise to presume to understand this complicated artist. In Young's career, every fact is in dispute, every reliable tendency is repudiated. Neil Young, the man of a half-dozen aliases (Bernard Shakey among them), won't even acknowledge his own middle name (Percival).

So here are the facts as given: Born in Toronto in 1945 to a tempestuous would-be alcoholic (his mother) and a well-known Canadian sportswriter (his dad), Young seems to have been cherubic as a kid, given to smoothing over familial discord where possible, mostly occupied with backyard pastimes like raising chickens and fishing. But this idyll of childhood came swiftly to a close in 1951, when Young fell ill during an outbreak of poliomyelitis. He was partly paralyzed for several days and recovered only slowly, a melancholy and thinner shadow of his former self.

Or perhaps his melancholy aspect derives from the next upheaval: Young's father left the family not long after his son's illness, and took Neil's only brother along with him. The afflicted and often isolated Neil, now alone in the company of his mother, and relocated to far-flung Winnipeg, began to turn to music -- to Chuck Berry, to Little Richard, to the lonesome howl of radio. Music appreciation led him to instrumental experimentation (ukulele, then guitar) and into a circle of local musicians featuring youthful dabblers who went on to become the likes of Randy Bachman (of Bachman Turner Overdrive) and Rick James, the superfreak. By the time he was 19, while visiting his father in Toronto (where he also became friendly with Joni Mitchell), Young was already accomplished enough as a musician to compose ''Sugar Mountain,'' arguably one of the greatest songs ever about innocence lost. From Toronto he made a beeline, in a used hearse, for Los Angeles, where he quickly landed in recording sessions with an unstable but inspired supergroup, Buffalo Springfield.

The majority of McDonough's biography concerns the incredibly fertile musical period in Young's life between the appearance of the first Buffalo Springfield album, in 1966, and the 1979 release of ''Rust Never Sleeps,'' the incendiary album recorded with the minimalist garage-rock specialists Crazy Horse. Thirteen years in which one lone Canadian songwriter managed to turn out ''After the Gold Rush,'' ''Harvest'' and ''Comes a Time,'' albums that many people who grew up in the 70's revere, as well as three more obscure records -- Tonight's the Night,'' ''On the Beach'' and ''Zuma'' -- that are even more astonishing. Not to mention the first album with Crazy Horse, ''Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere,'' recorded in 1969; the well-known work with Crosby, Stills and Nash; a couple of throwaway LP's; even a film.

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There are revelations in abundance in McDonough's version of this spree of accomplishment. For example, there is the considerable friction among the members of Buffalo Springfield: ''We hated each other,'' Young is quoted as saying. Apparently the situation wasn't improved by Young's tendency to have epileptic seizures during gigs. Early during a set in 1966, McDonough writes, ''Young bolted from the stage midsong. . . . Stills rushed offstage after Neil, and the crowd swarmed toward the exit door after them. Out in the parking lot Young was sprawled across a Corvette, convulsing.''

After the drama of Buffalo Springfield and an initial solo album that some derided as overworked and fussy, Young began to search for situations that were more flexible, less predictable. McDonough gives chilling glimpses into the madness surrounding ''Tonight's the Night'' in 1973, one of the darkest of Young's recording sessions, in which tequila and marijuana (Young and his band were fond of a pot delivery system called the honey slide) were seemingly more important than whether the musicians could actually play their instruments. ''We weren't stumbling or anything,'' the Crazy Horse drummer, Ralph Molina, recalls here. ''We'd just get to a point where you get a glow, just a glow.'' Fans thirsty for the melancholy hues of Neil Young will not be disappointed: He avoids lights! He drinks tequila all night long! Songs are recorded in one take! Songs are made up on the spot!

INTERNECINE squabbles among members of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, all of whom (with the exception of Stephen Stills) have cooperated with this biography, also come

in for extensive and unflattering depiction. For example, here's Graham Nash reporting Stills's reaction to a backstage visit by Bob Dylan: ''Stephen looks at me -- and this is a direct quote -- he said, 'He's no musician.' I said, 'What?' 'He's a good songwriter . . . but he's no musician.' ''

When ''Shakey'' is less concerned with music, however, it loses its way. While no self-respecting Young fan can quarrel with McDonough's attention to detail, with his exhaustive research, the difference between the lean and approachable biography we might have had and the windy one before us is to be found in the inclusion of lengthy interviews between biographer and subject (they amounted to some 50 hours). These italicized interviews are scattered throughout the text, and they are occasionally illuminating, as in the passages that concern Young's devotion to his children, two of whom are disabled, to differing degrees of severity: ''My life with my children has been quite an experience for me. My boy Ben is a spastic, quadriplegic, cerebral-palsied, non-oral child . . . with a big heart and a beautiful smile. He's just a wonderful human being. It did something to me . . . when he was born.''

More often, though, McDonough's persistent confrontations feel hysterical, even a little shrill, especially as refracted in the substandard dialect that McDonough fabricates to render Young's own voice: ''Heh heh. Why don't you just get as much money as you can'' for the book and ''then bury'' it? Young asks. ''You can run to Panama. I'll cover ya -- heh heh. And then when I die, everybody can read it. Waddya think?'' The effect is to make the musician, a thoughtful articulator of his motives, sound careless, disengaged, even a little burned out.

This pitting of writer against subject becomes the overriding strategy in the last 200 pages of ''Shakey.'' While it is true that Young's work in the 1980's -- Old Ways,'' a Reaganesque country album; ''Everybody's Rockin','' a detour through the 50's; or ''Landing on Water,'' probably the worst album Young ever made -- is almost completely indefensible, McDonough is not only aggrieved by these efforts, he is apoplectic. Likewise with Young's diminished appetite for music and publicity in the 90's: ''I spent the first three years of the 90's chasing Neil Young. It was a cat-and-mouse game of absurd proportions -- faxes, phone calls, lawyers, agents and managers. I was on Young like fleas on a dog, but he evaded me at every turn.'' Wanting for inflammatory material, McDonough attempts to provide the sparks in Young's later years on his own: the music Young made during his Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction, he writes, ''was a bore . . . and broadcast around the world to boot. It seemed depressingly ironic that Young, such a critic of television, was going to be a star of the Hall of Fame's first MTV broadcast.''

No matter how difficult Young seems in his professional and personal lives, no matter how gnomic, how impossible to interpret or locate, a biography as provocational and embittered as this one often is can only induce us to side with the subject himself, at the expense of biographer and book. Accordingly, it is McDonough, not Young, who feels shaky on this outing. Less would certainly have been more. Meanwhile, where does all this leave us with respect to Young's recent composition, ''Let's Roll''? Will we ever know if its unsettling message and jaunty backing vocals are meant to be as disarmingly transparent as they seem? Will you permit me some related questions? Ever wondered if ''Rockin' in the Free World'' wasn't meant to be a burlesque? How about ''A Man Needs a Maid''? And do welfare mothers really make better lovers? Part of the uncanny shrewdness of Neil Young, never more apparent than in the nearly 800 pages of ''Shakey,'' is in the evasion.

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A version of this review appears in print on May 26, 2002, on Page 7007013 of the National edition with the headline: You're Strange, but Don't Change. Today's Paper|Subscribe